Physicist Harold White stunned the aeronautics world when he announced that he and his team at NASA had begun work on the development of a faster-than-light warp drive, George Dvorsky reports on io9.

Vulcan command ship features a warp engine similar to an Alcubierre Drive. Image courtesy CBS.

His proposed design, an ingenious re-imagining of an Alcubierre Drive, may eventually result in an engine that can transport a spacecraft to the nearest star in a matter of weeks — and all without violating Einstein’s law of relativity.

The idea came to White while he was considering a rather remarkable equation formulated by physicist Miguel Alcubierre. In his 1994 paper titled, “The Warp Drive: Hyper-Fast Travel Within General Relativity,” Alcubierre suggested a mechanism by which space-time could be “warped” both in front of and behind a spacecraft.

White speculates that such a drive could result in “speeds” that could take a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in a mere two weeks — even though the system is 4.3 light-years away.

Equal parts harrowing adventure and indulgent luxury, taking an international flight in the 1930s was quite an experience, Matt Novak reports in Paleofuture. But it was an experience that people who could afford it signed up for in droves.

circa 1935: Waiter service aboard Imperial Airways ‘Scylla’ during its flight from London to Paris. (Photo by J. B. Collingham/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Nearly 50,000 people would fly Imperial Airways from 1930 until 1939. But these passengers paid incredibly high prices to hop around the world. The longest flights could span over 12,000 miles and cost as much as $20,000 when adjusted for inflation.

A flight from London to Brisbane, Australia, the longest route available in 1938, took 11 days and included over two dozen scheduled stops.

Marion Cannon Schlesinger talks about feminism, privilege, Julia Child, and the Kennedy era, in a conversation with Heidi Legg reported in The Atlantic.

Marian Cannon Schlesinger at her home in Cambridge (Susan Lapides)

“Just go ahead and do your thing no matter what,” says Marian Cannon Schlesinger to today’s young women. At 101 years of age, she is still painting, writing, watching Rachel Maddow, and reading two newspapers a day.

Matt Cardy/Getty Images A portrait of Mary Shelley from the collection of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.

And now, the original manuscript is also the centerpiece of the first phase of the online Shelley-Godwin Archive, an ambitious digital project, Jennifer Schuessler reports in NYT’s Arts Beat.

The manuscript is itself a sort of patched-together monster. It survives mainly in two notebooks written by Mary, with editorial changes and comments made in Percy’s hand. On the site, users can hit a button to view only those words written by Mary or Percy. They can also view the surviving portions of the fair copy, written mostly in Mary’s hand, which was circulated to publishers.